Journalism and Mosul
The New York Times uses the bombing in Mosul to attack President Bush--and show their true colors.
by Hugh Hewitt
EVEN BEFORE THE DOCTORS had completed their evacuation of the wounded to Germany in the aftermath of the attack on the Mosul dining hall, and certainly before all the next of kin of the dead had been notified, New York Times reporter Richard Stevenson had sat down at his word processor to manufacture a story on how the attack would cripple George W. Bush's second term domestic agenda.
It wasn't Tet, of course, and not even the Beirut bombing, and decent people might have allowed the dead to be buried before politicizing the Mosul massacre, but Stevenson wasn't going to let taste or facts get in the way of his story. Under the headline Bush's New Problem: More Carnage in Iraq Could Eclipse His Ambitious Domestic Agenda--the headline was changed after I blogged about it yesterday--Stevenson began his article this way:
"The deadly attack on a United States military base in northern Iraq on Tuesday scrambled the Bush administration's hopes of showing progress toward stability there, while making clear that the war is creating a nasty array of problems for President Bush as he gears up for an ambitious second term. Despite weathering criticism of his Iraq policy during the presidential campaign, Mr. Bush is heading into his next four years in the White House facing a public that appears increasingly worried about the course of events in Iraq and wondering where the exit is."
Through 17 paragraphs Stevenson lays on the doom and gloom, but as evidence for his belief that the Mosul attack has derailed Bush's yet-to-begin second term, Stevenson offers only this quote, in the last paragraph of the story, from former United States Senator Warren Rudman:
"The big risk for the president is that if this continues to escalate, it could overtake much of what he wants to do. . . . If this is in some way a precursor of an escalation into a more sophisticated attack by the guerilla insurgents, it would make members of Congress very uneasy and the American people very uneasy."
Reporter Stevenson wasn't exactly plowing new ground with his tasteless exploitation of a mass casualty attack. Six months earlier he'd written pretty much the same story about how Iraq was clouding the president's political future, complete with another Warren Rudman quote.
"The problem the administration has is that the predicates it laid down for the war have not played out," Stevenson quoted Rudman as saying on June 17, 2004. "That could spell political trouble for the president, there's no question."
I am not sure why anyone is interested in the observations of an out-to-pasture senator whose principal legacy is David Souter, but I don't blame Rudman for spouting his "look at me" gloom and doom. The New York Times, on the other hand, has no excuse for exploiting the loss of life in Iraq for its own political agenda even before the families of the victims have been notified. It was a manufactured story, one that Stevenson had peddled six months earlier and which had been repudiated on November 2, dusted off and sold as new "news" using the hook of dead Americans.
Perhaps if Stevenson or his editor had bothered to read first-person accounts of the dead and wounded--a chaplain blogged on the aftermath in Mosul at Training for Eternity well before deadline at the Times--they wouldn't have been in such a rush to score political points out of a terrorist attack on U.S. troops.
But they were in a rush, as if they could cue their anti-Bush colleagues in legacy media of an opportunity to start playing the greatest hits from January 1968. Read the Stevenson piece closely and you will see their is zero prompt for using the Mosul attack to launch on President Bush but for the reporter's decision that the loss of two dozen soldiers' lives must somehow turn into a repudiation of the recently reelected president. It is Richard Stevenson's view of what the meaning of Mosul must be, unsupported by anything except a windy utterance from a long irrelevant foghorn.
If this is what "journalism" has become, it is time for the papers that sell this stuff to make easily available biographies of the writers who are putting out polemic dressed up as reporting, and not just a list of their recent stories. I went hunting for a biography of Richard Stevenson to see what I could find, and the answer is "not much." Too bad, because an agenda journalist like Stevenson ought to at least let folks know where he's been acquiring all the perspective and insight that allows him to pen such prophetic pieces.
Perhaps it matters, for instance, that Los Angeles Times political reporter Ronald Brownstein coauthored a book with Ralph Nader (Who's Poisoning America?).
But it is increasingly obvious that the reporters of many papers, think the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, for instance, have all but openly declared for the opponents of the president. If agenda journalists want to wage war on the war, that's their right, and an issue for the publishers and subscribers. Readers, though, have a right to have opinion pieces clearly demarcated as such, not dressed up as "news analysis" and run on A-6.
In an interview with C-SPAN's Brian Lamb last week, Fox News's Roger Ailes was asked what was being taught in journalism school. He replied:
"Well I think they get too political from time to time. I think they draw conclusions for students, at least many of the ones that I have talked to. They don't necessarily teach them the simple things of gather all the facts, present all the facts. I think in many cases they have agendas. You know, I was asked by a university to give them some money and I went to the university and I taught a couple of classes and I interviewed a bunch of students and I said: 'I'm not going to give you any money until you can graduate somebody who likes America. It's not a bad country you know. Soon as you get me somebody like that I'll get you some money , but based on what they're learning, you'd think we lived somewhere else.'"
It sounds like Richard Stevenson has a second career as the dean of a j-school waiting for him.
Hugh Hewitt is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, and author most recently of If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends Upon It. His daily blog can be found at HughHewitt.com.
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